In the name of the God who is love ☩ Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Amen.
It’s all about love. It really is. If we could all know just how deeply we are loved, remember this love as the core of our identity, and recognize that participating in and sharing this love is the only the worth doing then we would come and see the abundant life that Jesus intends for us. A life well lived is a life lived in the way of love. This is what today’s Collect and Scripture passages are pointing us towards.
The
Collect captures it so well: O God, you have taught us to keep all your
commandments by loving you and our neighbor. We know that the Golden Rule gives
us this wisdom. It is the Great Commandment that Jesus gives – love God and
love our neighbors. We keep the commandments by loving. What is loving, we are
to do; what is not loving, we are not to do. We know from Scripture that Jesus
comes to us because God so loves the world and that by sharing in this love, we
will be known as his disciples. This love is our source, our identity, and our
mission. When Jesus sends out the seventy to proclaim the Kingdom of God he is
sending us out in the name of love to proclaim this love to the world.
It’s
an easy enough message to state, but more complicated to understand and put into
practice. This is because we don’t always know what we mean when we say “love.”
If we were to define love based on how we often use it, it would be something
like “I like you a whole lot.” Which is a nice sentiment, but that isn’t love. One
theologian has said that “to love is to will the good of the other.” I like
that definition – love is about our wills, our intentions, our purposes
directed towards something beyond us. If a picture is worth a thousand words,
then the picture of love that will save us some time is Jesus on the Cross. Love
can certainly be rooted in thoughts and feelings, but love becomes real with
actions, actions that cost us something and give life to others.
What
is interesting about the commission that Jesus issues in Luke is that the
seventy are not told to further the Kingdom of God nor are they tasked with
building the Kingdom, rather Jesus tells them to proclaim the Kingdom. We don’t
have to develop the strategy, come up with a message, or create the plan – we simply
announce what has already been done by Jesus. The mission is to announce that
the Kingdom has come near, that God’s love has come to us.
The Kingdom of God
is one way of understanding what love is all about. The Kingdom that Jesus speaks
of is not a geographical place – Israel is not the Kingdom of God, nor is the
United States. Later in Luke when speaking about the Kingdom, Jesus says “The
kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they
say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is
among you.” Another way of putting it would be that the Kingdom is about the beloved
community of God. The Kingdom is not a place, but a reality, a state of grace,
compassion, generosity, and belovedness which define and shape our
relationships with God, ourselves, our enemies, and our neighbors.
This
is why Jesus connects healing the sick with announcing the Kingdom. One of the
great hymns about love opens with “My song is love unknown, my Savior’s love to
me; love to the loveless shown, that they might lovely be.” That is what Jesus
has done for us – to show love to the loveless that we might lovely be. Though
we are marred by sin, full of contradictions, doubts, and apathy, lacking love
for God, ourselves, and others, Jesus nevertheless comes to us and shows us
love to make us lovely. When we live with that forgiveness at the core of our
identity and announce this grace to others, that is the Kingdom. As we strive
for beloved community, we are proclaiming the proximity of God’s reconciling
love.
Jesus
also describes this reality of love as “peace,” as he says that as we enter a
place we are to say “Peace to this house.” Peace is not about a lack of hostility;
peace is conflictive. This is why Jesus warns us that we are going out into the
midst of wolves. Instead of peace being about what is missing, namely conflict,
peace is about what is present: the fullness of love. The sort of peace that
Jesus speaks of is shalom in Hebrew and it means something like
fullness, wholeness, or wellness. Peace is a description of things being as
they should. As we’ve already seen, another way of saying things being as they
should is when we love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all
our strength, all our mind, and love our neighbors as ourselves.
Right
now, there is, decidedly, a lack of peace in our lives and our society. There
is a lack of civility in our politics and interactions with one another – just go
to a school board meeting or airport, or read the comments in the newspaper or
online, and you’ll see this lack on full display. There is a lack of peace in
our personal lives, as evidenced by the endless hours of watching videos or
scrolling on phones as an attempt to pacify ourselves. Others use substances,
gamble, or turn hobbies into obsessions to try to find peace. Yes, of course,
there are bright spots everywhere, as the grace of God is found everywhere, but
“peaceful” is not a word that many people would use to describe the state of
things right now.
A
significant reason for this restlessness is a lack of love in our culture. I realize
that I’m preaching to the choir – but church attendance is at an all-time low.
During the pandemic, for the first time since it has been tracked, less than
50% of Americans said that they were religiously affiliated. Yes, I know it’s
summertime and attendance usually dips in the summer – but not like this. In
January 2020, on an average Sunday at St. Luke’s, we had about 160 people between
the two liturgies. Now, we’re just over 100 people on a Sunday. And this isn’t
unique to St. Luke’s – I’ve spoken with colleagues across denominations, the
Diocese, and the country and the same trend is there. We can say that we love
God all we want, but when there’s not much evidence to support that claim we
can’t be surprised when there is a lack of peace in our lives.
Church
attendance is not magic – if everyone attended church every week, this would
still be a nation of sinners, but we could at least be a bit more loving in our
sinfulness. The thing is, it’s awfully hard to give what we do not have. If we have
not received peace, it’s hard to be at peace. If we are not reminded of just
how fully and graciously we are loved, it is more of a challenge to be loving.
And this is why liturgy is so important.
We
do not come to worship because God requires it or needs it, but because we need
it. We require worship in the same way that plants require soil and water. We
all worship something, we all have a sun around which our lives orbit. It’s a
question of what is at the center. If it is power, wealth, success, pleasure,
personal integrity, we will never find that peace which passes all understanding.
Worship grounds us in God’s love and empowers us to thrive in this love by
sharing it. Love is one of the only things that grows the more we give it away.
In coming to together as a beloved community in intentional worship to come and
see God’s abundant grace, as we pray, confess our sins, hear the story of God’s
love for us, and receive the bread of heaven and cup of salvation we are
experiencing things as they are intended to be and thus receive the peace of
the Kingdom to then proclaim to the world.
In
Galatians, St. Paul is pointing to the same thing when he refers to the new
creation. The Galatian church was short on peace as divided factions were not
walking in the way of love. And so he writes to say that the distinctions that
we create are meaningless because of the all-surpassing love of God. In all
seriousness, why do we insist on not living in the love and peace that we have
been given? God came in the flesh to us, showed us the fullness of love, died to
make it clear that God loves us, and then rose from the dead to further
demonstrate that love is the most powerful thing in all creation. And yet we
still fight, neglect, and abuse one another? St. Paul writes to remind us of
this new creation – of just how wonderful and beautiful God’s love for us is.
As
he does so, he writes “May I never boast of anything except the Cross of our Lord
Jesus Christ.” That’s what it’s all about. A cross-shaped life is what Jesus
came to give us because in the cross we find peace, grace, and love. The cross
teaches us that all can be redeemed, that death is not final, and that there is
no limit to God’s love.
As
we’re thinking about how we can keep the commandments by loving God and our
neighbor, I want to make sure this sermon is practical, not theoretical. Elsewhere
in Galatians, St. Paul writes that we are to “bear one another’s burdens.” This
is one way we love one another and find the peace that comes from being in
beloved community. I’ve been so humbled to have received a lot of appreciative
feedback on last Sunday’s sermon. The sermon was shared with people beyond this
church and I’ve received several notes from women, some who identify as conservative
and others as progressive, who have shared very personal experiences of how
isolated they have felt from the Church because of reproductive issues. In
short, we haven’t been bearing one another’s burdens.
The
Church has either been silent on issues related to reproduction or it has been
judgmental, which has left women and families dealing with miscarriages and
infertility to deal with things on their own. Because we have made certain
topics “off-limits,” we have essentially refused to be a beloved community that
bears one another’s burdens because we have said, “I don’t want to talk about that.”
If the Church is to have any future, we can no longer let people suffer because
we don’t want to have uncomfortable conversations. And a similar point is true
for listening to the experiences of African-Americans and people of color in
our society. Call those conversations whatever you want, but we have to learn
about the burdens of our brothers and sisters if we’re going to carry them
together.
Another
way to practice this peace and love is living as if it were already true,
because it is. I will not name names, but sometimes people leave the church. To
be honest, it breaks my heart. Not so much because I feel rejected, but because
I can’t stand the thought of something I did or said, or didn’t say or do ever
coming between someone and God. In attempting to find reconciliation with one such
person, I sent a letter in which I wrote “The fact of the matter is that
eventually, all will be reconciled in Christ. It’s always sweeter when that can
be enjoyed now instead of later.”
As I say often, “all
shall be well.” And it shall be, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have this wellness
now. Because of the love of God in Christ, things have already been made well. Every
time we choose forgiveness over resentment, honesty over silence, reconciliation
over estrangement, we are participating in the work of loving God and loving
our neighbor. I don’t know who it is that you need to forgive, perhaps even
yourself, but do it. Life is too short, our world is too short on peace for us not
to receive and share the love that we have in Christ.
Jesus tells us that the
harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. It is for us to enjoy the
abundance of God’s love and share it with all.
